Keystone XL Has Reared Its Ugly Head Again – And We Have 24 Hours To Stop It

President Obama rejected Keystone XL last month, but now many Senators are rushing to resurrect it in order to protect their friends, Big Oil. The Senate could vote as early as Tuesday on a deal that would greenlight construction of the pipeline. As you read this, the oil industry is tightening the screws on the remaining Senators they need to get this thing passed.

To stop them, we need a massive response. That’s why, for the next 24 hours, the climate movement is uniting to blitz the Senate with messages from across the country demanding that they reject Keystone XL. Our goal is to collect and send 500,000 messages between now and the vote on Keystone. Dozens of organizations are working together, and we will be joined by bloggers, media figures, and our celebrity allies to make our message unavoidable.

There is no way to build Keystone XL that does not accelerate production of horrendously dirty tar sands oil and contribute disastrous amounts of carbon to the atmosphere. The only people benefiting from this pipeline would be Big Oil — every single claim about the positive economic impacts has been proven false by independent review.

24 hours from now, a team in Washington, DC will march into the Senate with 50 giant boxes, each holding 10,000 signatures (or more!). It will be a unified show of our power: our voices against the dollars of the fossil fuel industry.

Thanks for everything you’ve done already. Let’s make the next 24 hours a big, big deal.

*UPDATE* We made it to 500,000 signatures! Alayna Yael Cohen, from Nebraska was the 500,000th signer and had this to say about the pipeline:

“the Senate Republicans have been working hard to keep Keystone XL alive despite the fact that the analysis of its supposed economic benefits cited by TransCanada is tainted by the ties of the Perryman Group (an economic research firm based in Waco, Texas) to the oil industry. the only independent study of the Keystone XL’s potential for creating US jobs found that the pipeline will likely create 500-1400 temporary construction jobs; not ‘more than 250,000 permanent jobs’ as the Perryman Group claimed in its 2010 report (not to mention, TransCanada’s Keystone I pipeline–which carries approximately half of the 1.1 million barrels PER DAY that XL is expected to carry–leaked 12 times in its first and only year of existence~). sign this petition to tell the Senate that the pipeline should be rejected until more light has been shed on the discrepancy between these estimates and the risks of the pipeline have been adequately addressed.”

Thanks to everyone for their efforts to put this squarely on the Senate’s radar today – now let’s push it even further!